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Relationships with Western church leaders are extremely difficult and uniquely painful if you experience godly human jealousy for the LORD God Jealous. 

One of the most immediate consequences of the embers of godly human jealousy being kindled by the Holy Spirit in your life will almost certainly be discord with pastors. I say that because men who run churches are very rarely wanting the disruption of the Spirit of God to rip through their congregations in fire. 

Fire purges and refines and consumes and engulfs; it is a safeguard not a threat and it is the refining work of God, via godly human jealousy, that starts wars rather than stops them and which is  unlikely to result in ‘church growth’ as much as it is fall-out.

When Phinehas did what Phinehas did, (Numbers 25:11), a war began between Israel and Midian which resulted in many casualties, sleepless nights and shrinking head counts. But Phinehas’ slaying of Zimri and Cozbi was not premediated or strategised; like with Samson and Gideon, the Spirit came upon them — clothed them no less — and so they too leapt to decisively radical action that blessed Yahweh and Yahweh’s covenant people. 

By contrast, far too many of us are willing to follow a church leader who is not jealous for the glory of God: who tolerates false doctrine, who panders to ‘powers that be’ and who trivialises apostasy while ‘catastrophising’ a lack of church membership. 

The Church is suffering because it is being run by men, (and, tragically also by women), whose voracious instinct is to slay the prophetic witness within its walls. This means that Phinehas-types are virtually always labelled ‘hurt’, ‘unteachable’ and even ‘unloving’ when they begin to express their God-given godly human jealousy. And so the Church plummets into ever-decreasing degrees of unjealousy.

Therefore, the greatest danger threatening you and your family is not so much the wokerati of our very sick society, nor the simmering  lawlessness coming to the boil in the nations, but rather a host of church leaders who refuse to ‘course correct’, to contribute their voice to a national solution to the lukewarm ‘business as usual’ that has rendered us a laughing stock.

We are not called to spear copulating adulterers to death in the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, but we are called to choose carefully, ask wise questions, probe for clarity and to always, always insist on biblical truth.  

In my experience, especially since the fall-out from COVID-19 and the megalomania of ensuing lock-downs, pastors are actively opposing the prophetic witness of godly human jealousy in the Body  of Christ by extinguishing, rejecting and vilifying the summons to repentance across all evangelical/Protestant denominations. 

It stands to reason then that you and I have a decision to make: 

Invite the fire of the Holy Spirit to set you ablaze for Christ, or remain within the neutered, effeminate, squeamish church cultures of our land. 

You have a choice of continuing to go through the motions of Sunday mornings and perhaps mid-week gatherings, stupefying in spiritual monotony and boredom, or else cry out to the Lord for a company of Christians to be a part of, (or  even to begin), with whom you are able to take the kind of decisive action that resulted in the utterly God-absorbed Phinehas being revered.

It is right and proper to call leaders to account, to call good men to answer for their cessationsim and egalitarianism and ecumenicalism, but if they heed you not it is assuredly not you who are causing the grievous tearing of schism. Rather, it is they who refuse to listen. 

You are not called to remain silent within a group of so-called Christians who tolerate —and even enjoy — false doctrine and apathy; you are called to use your fleeting life to magnify God. 

If this therefore requires you to leave a likely unjealous church in order to read your Bible and pray thoroughly…that is fine. Or perhaps if radical action requires you connecting with others with whom the inhaling embers of godly human jealousy can also  be allowed to breathe, then praise God!

I rebuke the church leaders of this country who make slight of doctrinal contradiction but who crucify the brother who exercises their courage to separate themselves from falsity and leave a church of compromise.

Gangrene must be dealt with much like two brazen idolaters copulating in the view of a repentant people.

I pray for church leaders every day, often with tears, but it is now time for more of us to act. 

In the words of the late Jim Elliot who, at the age of twenty-eight, gave his life for the glory of God by dying at the end of another spear:

“He makes His ministers a flame of fire.’ Am I ignitable? God deliver me from the dread asbestos of ‘other things.’ Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be a flame. But flame is transient, often short-lived. Canst thou bear this, my soul – short life? In me there dwells the Spirit of the Great Short-Lived, whose zeal for God’s house consumed Him. ‘Make me Thy Fuel, Flame of God.”  

Maranatha!

In Christ,

Nick Franks